On the brink of World War II: Justus Doenecke's Storm on the Horizon.

• Author: Raico, Ralph
• Position: Review Essay

Justus Doenecke, professor of history at the University of South Florida, has made a distinguished career of researching the history of American "isolationism" before and after World War II. His latest book, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), is marked by his unsurpassed familiarity with the relevant archives--reflected in the 170 pages of endnotes--and by his rare and refreshing objectivity. The work has already won the annual book award of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association.

Doenecke begins with the inevitable terminological issue. He eschews referring to the protagonists of Storm on the Horizon as isolationists, the term preferred, then as now, by their interventionist adversaries. This rhetorically powerful argument by epithet has been deployed from 1898 to the present. Today, simply uttering the word itself is probably decisive on questions of foreign policy for most Americans. In its place, Doenecke rightly prefers the less-loaded terms anti-interventionist and noninterventionist.

As our author makes amply clear, there were "many mansions" in the antiwar movement, from Father Charles Coughlin and his magazine Social Justice to the Communist Party (until June 22, 1941, that is, when the CPUSA turned on a dime and became fanatically pro-war). Very sensibly, however, Doenecke pays the most attention to the pacifist and, above all, the liberal and conservative opponents of war, most of whom were associated in one way or another with the America First Committee (AFC), founded in September 1940.

During its brief existence and ever after, the AFC was and has been subjected to mindless smears. A recent example occurred in connection with Princeton University's unsealing of many of the papers of Charles Lindbergh, the committee's most prominent speaker, and of his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In a report for the Associated Press (March 30, 2001), Linda A. Johnson informs us that "Lindbergh gave numerous speeches at the time denouncing President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews as `warmongers.'" As concerns the Jews, this statement is a lie or, more likely, the product of a slovenly scribbler who could not be bothered to ascertain the easily accessible truth (see Berg 1998, 425-27). Lindbergh gave only a single, famous (or notorious) speech mentioning the Jews, in Des Moines, in October 1941. There he identified them not as "warmongers" but as, along with the Roosevelt administration and the British government, one of the main forces pushing us into war with Germany.

It is noteworthy that among the hundreds of letters Princeton made public were expressions of support for Lindbergh's antiwar stance from well-known writers such as W. H. Auden and, rather lower down the literary line (although she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938), Pearl Buck. Readers surprised by the appearance of these names in this context would likely profit from consulting Bill Kauffman's brilliant America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics (1995). As Kauffman shows, many of the celebrities of the American cultural scene--outside of Manhattan and Hollywood--strongly sympathized with the AFC: Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Henry Miller, Sinclair Lewis, Kathleen Norris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Beard, and H. L. Mencken, among others. The total membership of the AFC exceeded eight hundred thousand, and it had millions of fellow travelers. The young John F. Kennedy and Gore Vidal were junior members of America First at their respective prep schools.

Storm on the Horizon proceeds by examining in detail the various episodes of the war and the controversies they generated at home, beginning with the German invasion of Poland and the "phony war," and ending with the last, futile negotiations with the Japanese envoys and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Doenecke deals with every significant issue of American foreign or military...